Richard Nixon took the secret to his grave. Thirty years after the Watergate break-in, there's a ra
ce to unerase - and it's hitting high gear.

By Tom McNichol

Paul Ginsberg owns more than 100 tape recorders, most
of them crammed into his basement audio lab, a low-ceilinged lair in Spring
Valley, New York, that he likes to call the Tape Cave. There's a clunky
Revox reel-to-reel from the early '70s that looks like it's straight out
of the Partridge Family's garage; 13 Tascam cassette decks modified to
copy tapes at various speeds; dozens of microcassette recorders scattered
about like matchbooks; and a Nagra SNS, the subminiature reel-to-reel that
went up in smoke at the beginning of every episode of Mission:
Impossible. But it's another reel-to-reel that holds a special
place in Ginsberg's collection. "This is the baby," he says, watching the
tape revolve. "It's a Sony TC-800B, the same kind used by the Nixon White
House to record the Watergate tapes."

As it happens, Ginsberg has dusted off his old Sony just in time, because
the Nixon White House is suddenly hotter than ever. Capitalizing on the
30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, former Nixon counselor John
Dean has stirred up a media frenzy with a book that claims to unmask the
case-breaking source Deep Throat. Meanwhile, Ginsberg is among a handful
of forensic audio experts vying to crack the infamous 181é2-minute
gap in a White House tape recorded three days after the burglary.

Photo by Martin Esseveld"If I manage to do it," says forensic audio guru Ginsberg, "my basement will become a national historic spot."

The gap appears in a recording made on June 20, 1972, as Nixon discussed
the Watergate break-in for the first time with his chief of staff, H. R.
Haldeman. When the White House revealed that part of the conversation had
been "accidentally" erased, a majority of Americans came to believe that
the man who insisted "I am not a crook" was that and more. Nixon resigned
in disgrace in 1974, but in the years since Watergate, the gap has remained
a tantalizing mystery.

Watergate scholars can't help but wonder: What could be incriminating enough
to make this the only Nixon tape erased, when so many hours of blatant
cover-ups, dirty tricks, expletives, and Jew-baiting were left untouched?
"It's the big unknown," says David Coleman, assistant professor at the
Miller Center of Public Affairs
at the University of Virginia, who's studying Nixon's taped conversations
for the university's Presidential Recordings Project. "It could contain
something innocuous. Or it could be another smoking gun."

Tape 342, as it's known by archivists, was last tested in 1974 by a panel
of audio experts, who concluded that the erasures were done in separate
segments. Whoever erased the tape pressed Record, stopped the tape, and
hit Record again, between five and nine times - hardly an accidental erasure.
But the panel was unable to retrieve any of the lost conversation. "The
experts concluded that it was a deliberate erasure," emails Bob Woodward,
who along with colleague Carl Bernstein did much of the groundbreaking
reporting on Watergate for The Washington Post. "The public
got the message: The tapes had very damaging information. The exact content
of the
18 1/2-minute gap would be interesting."

Last summer, the National Archives and Records Administration decided it
was time to take another look, in the hope that advances in digital technology
would be able to restore the conversation. NARA invited audio experts to
demonstrate how they might retrieve intelligible speech. The competition
- a battle of the bands among a dozen or fewer audio experts - is expected
to last more than a year. Before any of them get their hands on the original
tape, they must show they can retrieve sound from test erasures without
doing damage. Those who succeed will get a crack at the real thing.

The recovery effort promises to be as tricky as Nixon himself. It's like
solving a Zen riddle: What is the sound of no one talking? And NARA isn't
paying any of the audio experts, though the attention they'll draw may
be its own reward. Ginsberg is well aware of the prestige that would come
with a successful decoding of Tape 342. "If I do manage to do it," he says, punching Stop on the TC-800B,
"I guess my basement will become a national historic spot."

An inveterate tinkerer who counts Thomas Edison as one of his heroes, the
56-year-old Ginsberg has built or modified much of the equipment in the
Tape Cave. Since 1974, he has run a business called Professional Audio
Laboratories out of his home. Most of his work involves enhancing and authenticating
surveillance tapes and other audiovisual evidence presented in criminal
and civil proceedings. He's been involved in more than 1,600 court cases,
including the Waco trial. He enhanced surveillance tapes recorded inside
the Branch Davidian compound to show that the fire was set from within
- not by the surrounding government troops.

For the Nixon case, Ginsberg is hoping that his TC-800B will give him a
leg up on his competition. By carefully measuring the class characteristics
of the Sony - wow and flutter (the percentage of low- and high-frequency
speed fluctuations), head alignment, and track configuration - Ginsberg
hopes to establish a technical baseline against which to compare subsequent
testing. Being a lifelong audio packrat just might pay off. "This is one
of those times," he says, "when it helps to have a crazy old piece of equipment."

Stroll into the National Archives in College Park,
Maryland, and ask to check out Tape 342, and the archivists will look at
you as if you've asked to wipe your feet on the Declaration of Independence.
Tape 342 is treated like a priceless heirloom, locked in a vault kept
at precisely 65 degrees Fahrenheit and 40 percent relative humidity. The
tape has been played just half a dozen times in the last three decades,
and only then to make copies.